“Do Not Forget your Pain”: Identities, Affect and Emotions in Russian and EU Cultural Diplomacy in Armenia

Scholarly attention on cultural diplomacy has focused predominantly on diplomatic agents’ projection efforts. Conversely, insights into how local audiences actively engage with such practices remain limited. To fill this gap, this article relies on scholarship on emotions in International Relations to examine cultural diplomacy as a practice that seeks to affectively bind subjects to projected identities. To grasp such processes, this framework is applied to Russia’s and the European Union’s (EU) cultural diplomacy in Armenia. Amidst a delicate security environment, this country case helps shed light on subjects’ engagement. To this end, the article draws on fieldwork conducted in Armenia and includes participant observation in cultural diplomatic events, 39 in-depth interviews with participants, cultural practitioners, policy experts and diplomatic agents, social media data, and cultural products. The article finds that both Russian and EU cultural initiatives in Armenia fail to affectively bind local audiences to the two actors’ projected identities.